Tuesday Morning Sunshine - 2nd July

[marktownley]

Was pleased to wake up this morning to blue skies, so got out of bed nice and early to get some viewing in before work. Seeing wasn't great so lots of sub frames and lots of runs were key to picking out a best image. First up the full disk with the SM90 and GH3 ICX916M - again lots of people online saying the sun is blank, absolutely not! Mid disk a filament divides opposing magnetic polarities of the turbulent plage of the active regions that were with us in April. In northern polar regions we see the hints of a near limb to limb polar crown which marks the position of start of cycle 25 jetstream. Then, in the southern hemisphere S6205 is a cycle 25 feature - anyone getting any pores in white light?

ha-fd-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

ha-fd-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Double stacking a scope reduces continuum leakage and so enhances the contrast of features, which for looking for the ghosts of cycle 25 is a bonus. So the obvious thing to do was to use the Daystar Quark with the SM90, using 2x2 binning got the effective pixel size up to a whopping 7.3um which works better for the f38 i'm now running the system at (certainly compared to the 3.69um native pixel size of this GH camera).

First up the filament and relic plage that is mid disk, these are cycle 24:

filament-ex-ar-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

filament-ex-ar-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Then to S6205, the little ephemeral bright point associated with cycle 25 in the southern hemisphere.

s6205-cycle-25-bw by Mark Townley, on Flickr

s6205-cycle-25-colour by Mark Townley, on Flickr

Hope you like these shots! I'm hoping to get a few more tomorrow morning weather permitting.

Mark

[Bob Yoesle]

Very nice images Mark! What generation of SM90 do you have? Just an etalon/BF or the whole SM scope?

For your DS images I'm assuming you're using the telecentric version. Has anyone tried the Combo version for DSing?

[Starry Jack]

Love the DS photos particularly. Beautiful patterns revealed.

[marktownley]

Thanks Bob, thanks Jack.

It's an SM90ii scope Bob, but comes with 'history'; it was commissioned for the BBC 'Sky at Night' TV programme 7 or 8 years ago and according to Coronado from it's serial number was classed as a prototype scope. It had a couple of owners since then and i've been fortunate to use it a number of times since, when it recently came up for sale I jumped at the opportunity to buy it.

Clear skies again this morning - more images from today to follow...

[Montana]

A very informative post Mark and excellent pictures

We actually have beautiful clear blue skies today, pity I am at work otherwise I would be looking for those pores
Alexandra

[Carbon60]

Another fine set of images, Mark.

Stu.

[MapleRidge]

Superb images Mark

Brian

[MAURITS]

Wonderfull images and details Mark.